The technically eighth entry in the popular horror series features the return of leading protagonists Leon S. Kennedy and Chris Redfield, along with new character Jake Muller, to combat against the latest B.O.W. manufacturer Neo-Umbrella.

My Resident Evil 6 Review

I would have never believed in a million years that a numbered sequel in the Resident Evil series would ever be as bad as Resident Evil 6 turned out to be. You would think with so much money and talent thrown at it that it would be in contention for game of the year. With so many things wrong it is hard to pinpoint exactly where to begin, but I’d have to say it starts with the 600 people working on it. On top of that Resident Evil 6 tries to be everything to every gamer out there, almost as if none of the 600 people working on it had any kind of communication. There is some shines of light in the game, but mostly just seeing what Capcom was going for and seeing what the game could have been.

The simple act of playing the game is a mess. Not getting that right doesn’t make me wonder how everything else in the game was put together so poorly. Going from Resident Evil 4 to 5 it seemed like Capcom was on the right track for making these game better for action shooters, but now in Resident Evil 6 they take a huge step backward from trying to give too much to both the shooter side and the survival horror side. The mixtures of more western style move and shoot with the series more vestigial elements of the original Resident Evil survival horror style. As frustrating as that it, the game play is also is also constantly taken away from the player, be it a cut scene, a loading screen, quick time event or having the game let you control the character but completely take control of the camera view away from you. The latter being the worst as you can still be attacked by an unseen enemy, which can cost player dearly with so many insta-deaths.

There is not only so many problems with Resident Evil 6, but also so much is done poorly. It is as close to being broken a game can get without actually being broken. The character movement is completely awkward. Wanting to simply turn around and instead your character take three steps in the wrong direction, aiming and shooting is very stiff most of time and even though you can now walk and shoot the stiffness makes the slowness of moving feel clunky at best. It is not helped by interactions with enemies constantly feel unresponsive, which also causes the player to usually use way more bullets then needed to take any one enemy down, which can be annoying when bullets are seemingly in very limited supply. There is many times that while shooting an enemy it feels as if the bullets are simply passing through the enemy not even harming them. The shooting as a whole is also hindered by the laser site constantly moving around violently into the aiming reticule, making for many wasted shots being fired. Then you have the camera movement, which is also clunky at best, giving the feeling to constantly keep it moving around you so you can always see what is going on in the environment, because otherwise you might end up in a tight location wishing you had moved the camera yourself while getting into that small location. Although, there is times that the camera is moved for you for no reason by the game when you come back from the cut scene. This can get on your last nerve instantly if you were shooting and a big baddie and now are being choked out by him because a moment before there was a cut scene that when you came back you were then facing with your back to him. Resident Evil 6 is constantly taking jabs at your sanity while simultaneously killing any enjoyment that might have been offered.

It is amazing that Resident Evil 6 did not get pushed back to work on the games glaring lack of polish, but what is even more amazing is that the game’s release date was actually pushed up to an earlier date. It seems like such a ridicules notion with all that is wrong with this game. This game could have used so much more polish that it makes me want to ask Capcom while they pushed up the release date. There is so many times that players can and will be killed by unavoidable scripted events. Making you want to throw your controller across the room and shut the game off (Which I finally did, shut it off). There is so many times were you are in a level and situation comes up were you are running and a dock blows up with you on it causing you to sink into the water and die or a truck comes from off-screen slamming into you and killing you. Sometimes it will happen to your partner, once racing to keep from being were the ground is falling from under me, I get away but my AI co-op partner was so stupid he stood there and died, causing me to play the whole thing again. That gets me onto the horrible teammate AI in this game. Outside of the usually perfect aim and the unlimited ammo they have, the AI is completely useless in almost every other way. There was a time playing Chris Redfield’s campaign that my whole team and Ada Wong (6 people) all stood by the wrong door not moving, nor acted like there were creatures in the room. One guy stood in place with his arms crossed. Meanwhile I had to run around and kill everything.

The game also never communicates with you while you are playing, unless it is to have a distant icon letting you know where the areas exit is or an item is you will need. This cause more frustration with the multi-level bosses the game is constantly throwing at you. It is not too surprising as like stated before; I don’t think the team that made this game communicated with each other, why would they do anything to communicate with the players? The bosses fights suffer from the same situation of bullets seemingly passing right through them making it feel as if you are not hurting them what-so-ever. It is even worse here because with ammo being not only limited, but sometime nonexistent you can find yourself trying to kill a boss with your knife until of course it kills you.

Another design choice about Resident Evil 6 that is annoying in many games is the inability to stop time in the game, even if you want to go into the options to mess with the controls or tamper with the audio/video options. Of course this goes for switching from weapons to first aid or grenades as well, which is made even more annoying by the games clumsy menu system and inventory system. If the inventory system isn’t annoying enough on its own and being that at anytime you can get caught with your pants down, it has the added annoyance of each campaign has a different inventory system menu to get use to. I get it, some thing that it makes a game scarier to feel panicked while switching between weapons. It doesn’t make a game any scarier, just more frustrating. It is a concept that is often used improperly, which Resident Evil 6 does.

Another way the game never communicates with the player is it never readily lets you know of a cover system or never tells you about quickly sliding under things (except in short lived loading screens), but it sure wanted you to know about all the quick time events you would suffer through by starting the game out with a horrible tutorial using most of all the different kinds of quick time events you would come across during the game. One could argue it is worthless to tell you there is a cover system; it is after all badly implemented. You have to be standing by something you can duck behind aiming your gun before it gives you the prompt to tap the X button to crutch down and then you have to continue to hold the aim button to stay down, otherwise you just stand back up. Also I am unsure why you have to hold down the aim button, you can not aim from behind cover at all, which really makes hiding behind cover completely useless, after all it is a shooter series now.

The story of Resident Evil 6 is thin at best and feels like any imagination was lost. Resident Evil 4 took players out of and instead of zombies it gave you an infection. At the time that was quite a ballsy move for the series, but it paid off. Then Resident Evil 5 kind of went back to the old ways of story with Wesker and Umbrella, but it did a great job of tying up all lose ends with that story line. So you would think that resident Evil 6 would be completely new right? Now there is Neo-Umbrella and Wesker’s son. Not much for imagination at all. The idea with Wesker’s son is somewhat interesting I will give them that, but still, come on. Also the concept of four main campaigns all intertwining with one another on a global scale seems like something amazing for the Resident evil series. Then there is the addition of having Chris Redfield and Leon Kennedy both in the same game, which should be like sex for Resident Evil fans. It is just too bad Capcom never build onto that with the story. You would think having big time players like Chris and Leon in the same game and having the chance to being each others personal spaces that Capcom would capitalize on it, but instead it is as if Chris and Leon basically never met. I have not played all the campaigns (didn’t have that much time to if I wanted to get a review written), but I have heard the game also uses the interaction with other campaigns to repeat boss fights and encounters, to the point that if you play the campaigns in the listed order the first last boss is the same as the last campaigns last boss, which really seems lazy and anti-climactic to me, but again I haven’t played through them all as of yet.

Resident Evil also has a Mercenaries mode, which I have not played. So I can not say anything at all about it. I am not even sure what it is at all. There is also an Agent Hunt mode wich allows players to enter into another players campaign as a monster and give them some trouble, but really Resident Evil 6 as a whole gives players enough trouble. Outside of that the Agent Hunt idea is brilliant. I have no yet toyed around with Agent Hunt either at this point.

Resident Evil 6 is a disaster in almost every way possible. For me it proves the old saying “too many cooks in the kitchen”. I love the Resident Evil series and I really like where they were going with it, Resident Evil 5 was a lot of fun and I played it repeatedly many times. There is so much wrong with resident Evil 6 it is hard to say where it started. The only really great thing to come from all they money spent on it was the look of it, the game is beautiful. It is unfortunate that everything else went so wrong. I would like to think Capcom will learn from the mistakes made here, but I am sure the game will sell a lot and they will see it as a great success and that would be most unfortunate for not only fans of the series, but fans of shooters and survival horror games in general. It is sad to see one of the major series in video game history be reduced to something less than mediocre, to something really not worth taking time to play. Maybe with the next console cycle we can have a reboot of the series.

Other reviews for Resident Evil 6 (PlayStation 3)

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